Good and Martyred
Reports say we may have killed Mohammed Atef, a top bin Laden lieutenant.

November 16, 2001 4:20 p.m.

eports say we may have killed Mohammed Atef, a top bin Laden lieutenant.

This is one of those moments when history seems to come together, when two warring sides achieve a strange confluence of interests across all that separates them. To wit: bin Laden and his associates, on the one hand, constantly say how they are willing to be killed for their cause, and we, on the other, are willing to kill them for their cause.

Isn't that kind of nice? It's a real "We Are the World" kind of moment.

There should be, if we take their words seriously, great rejoicing in the bin Laden camp at the excellent martyrdom of Atef. We don't know what kind of bomb he was dispatched with, but we do know that he did a spectacular job of being dispatched. Congratulations, Mr. Atef, and may your splendid example be followed by your colleagues very soon!

It would be easier to take seriously the bin Ladenites' call to martyrdom, of course, if they would just stand still and let themselves be martyred, instead of running into the hills like nothing is so important to them as avoiding a few 1,000-pounds dropped from a B-52. But why should such a corrupt excrescence of Western culture, such a banal and "cowardly" weapon, faze these fearsome warriors?

The debate over the bravery or cowardice of the suicide hijackers always seemed a no-brainer: It is not a courageous act to sneak onto an airliner full of unsuspecting people, and slit the throats of women. (See Jonah's excellent column on this point.) But anyone who had illusions about the courage of bin Laden and co. should look at what they do when confronted with a real military: They run and hide, and run some more.

The success of the Afghanistan campaign over the last week is testament to the efficacy of killing your enemies. It was something we had been awfully chary about during most of the 1990s. Even the early part of this campaign seemed to have been stifled by a "gentle war" restraint.

But over the last two weeks or so Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seemed to get steadily more blunt about our aim: to kill the Taliban. He would actually use the word "kill." This was refreshing stuff, since we had almost none of it from the previous administration.

A Nexis search of all of 1999 — when we fought a war in Kosovo — doesn't turn up one instance of Bill Cohen using the word "kill" to refer to what we were doing to the Serbs. That apparently would have been much too impolite.

The few times the word does show up is in statements like this: "We are attacking the military infrastructure that President Milosevic and his forces are using to repress and kill innocent people."

Well, you can't kill military infrastructure, as we learned during the first few weeks of the Afghan war when we tried to impress the Taliban by blowing up their buildings. What gets their attention — what prompts defections, betrayals, and groveling surrender — is the sort of thing that was happened to Mohammed Atef, now apparently good and martyred.

Dowd Footnote
Maureen Dowd wrote the other day about how "embarrassed" the U.S. should be by the "savage force" of the Northern Alliance. Before she apologizes for America, however, Dowd should at least read her own newspaper. This is from the New York Times yesterday:

Alberto Cairo, who has worked for the International Red Cross in Afghanistan for 12 years, said the shift in power was the most peaceful he had seen in a country ruined by 22 years of almost continual fighting and fast-shifting alliances among rival clans and warlords.

He said his organization had collected the bodies of 10 Afghan and Pakistani fighters in the capital, but could not say whether they had died in fighting or in reprisals as the Northern Alliance forces entered Kabul on Tuesday.

He praised the general lack of violence and looting in the city and the work so far of the roughly 2,000 alliance policemen and soldiers securing it.